making decisions

an unedited brain dump on timing

Xooang Choi, The Islet of Asperger Type - Ⅵ, 2009

This is not an essay about new year’s resolutions, though it will begin that way. The most common theme I noticed while discussing with friends our hopes and goals for the coming year was that everyone is tired. And rightfully so, the last few years were absolute chaos. We were shackled at home for a year, then suddenly everyone left their jobs, roamed city to city like ghosts, never staying in one place for longer than a few months at a time. “Home” became the websites we visited daily.

It seems we’re overdue for a retvrn—time to “touch grass” or “pretend I do not see” or whatever silly little phrase people are using now to mask the collective fear that we may all just be exhausted.

I’ve personally very much enjoyed just staying the fuck put (pardon my French).

I go to the same physical office everyday, and can very easily envision doing the exact same thing five years from now. I tend to my home, slowly accumulate small knick knacks here and there. I see the same friends on a weekly basis; the conversations are lighter, less charged, maybe even a little boring.

I have little desire to question where I am or what I’m doing, and instead I’m genuinely excited to craft life around what I already have.

These are all normal parts of growing up, I know.

I talk to college students often, and most of their questions boil down to: “How do I make decisions?”

I have never met a student who was not very outwardly anxious about this. In a sandbox of opportunity, it’s difficult to know how and when and even whether to narrow your choices.

My response is as much self-soothing for me as it is advice for them: “Your preferences will be revealed to you over time. The more you explore and lean into your hunches, the easier it will be to make choices without regret.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think the hardest piece to wrap my head around still remains the role of time in all of this.

I’ve written about how there are things you can only learn over time, and not by any brute force. This realization continues to unlock a lot for me. I trust my own intuition and experiences more strongly. I trust that time will reveal to me what I need. These convictions make me more confident in my decisions.

The element that I still grapple with is knowing how to accept when time makes the decision for you. What to do when you realize you want something or that you’ve made a decision a little too early or too late.

I actually had a conversation about this with both a 21 year old (she) and a 35 year old (he) this past week. I gave her my spiel about how time is actually great and to not worry about it too much, and later that same day I expressed the opposite to him (lol): “How do you know when to accept timing vs when to fight it? What’s the difference between trusting that time will reveal things to you vs just lazily sitting on your laurels and letting it happen to you?”

His response went something like this:

“This is something I still grapple with, and you’ll continue to grapple with it for the rest of your life. What begins to soften the unrest is that you will accumulate so many examples in your life of things that only happened because of timing, both good and bad. And you’ll learn to appreciate them.”

Maybe that’s a non-answer, but as is most advice you get from other people. Until I understand for myself, I’ll self-affirm:

I know that there are things I won’t be able to make a decision about until the time is right.

Accepting that time will sometimes make decisions for me is a difficult pill to swallow, and that’s okay.

I find comfort in knowing that regardless of being 21, 24, or 35, we all struggle with time somehow.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Helena Fitzgerald:

“If we wait for things long enough, we almost always change during the waiting. Waiting for the thing we want, we end up living forward into our lives. It is almost impossible to arrive at something the way we hope and imagine that we will, because we cannot predict all of the other changes that come along with it, all of the constant bargains we do not even know we are making. Change is just the way forward motion happens; I can almost never have the thing that I want, because when I wanted it, I imagined the future in the conditions of the past.”

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all the appreciation in the world to Jacky, Vivian, Mathu, and Nick. our conversations make me better everyday.